Conflikt, in more detail.
Feb. 2nd, 2010 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdOkay! Let's try another voice post. (It's funny; I could spend the entire weekend playing my hands off, but a day and a half of typing totally destroys them. And by funny, I mean brutally frustrating. Anyway, let's see if we can get this thing to accept a few sentences at a time.)
So, Conflikt. Conflikt is one of those words it's going to get wrong every damn time. at least that one I can understand. Fortunately, Conflikt itself doesn't have any of these problems. Honestly, I gotta say, these people know how to throw a goddamn party. The only frustrating thing is how many people I didn't actually get to hang out with. Really, that includes most of the people I know actually at the convention! Irony is so ironic. Mostly, I got to wave at them as they ran on doing some convention committee thing. I also didn't get to play around with... Peg?'s omg huge bass, and I even talked to her about doing that on Friday but never got the chance to actually do it. But I did get to catch up with Tom Smith, who I haven't seen in a long time, and Alec, who I see more often, but not nearly often enough, and met up with Brooke (briefly) and Foxipher (also briefly) and I met some new people! Whose names I can't remember! Even if I can remember their faces, voices, and such quite well, and the things we did. (Sometimes I hate my brain.)
Anyway, highlights: Tom's concert. He's always been a great live performer, and that's still entirely true, and it was good to hear him again after a long time. Finally getting to play in circle with Alec, even if I didn't get confident enough early enough to take the solo that he tried to hand me. (I feel really lame about that. Part of it was me not being sure people could even hear me, but part of it was also ph33r.) Selling my first CD, even if it is an in progress demo! OMG so awesome! Thanks guys! You are awesome. ^_^ The band scramble; I had a lot of fun working on that, and I think the one-time performance of the band Minotaur went pretty well. ^_^ Sadly, my spectacularly bad problem with names is applicable here, so if you were the other people in the band please reply! That way I can say who you were! We covered one of S00j's songs, "Into the Labyrinth", and it's kind of an amazing song to sing. Something about it, as a performer, is kind of intoxicating. I kind of wish I hadn't also been playing bouzouki, I really wanted to cut loose more completely than I could while also playing an instrument. I also got some advice I really think I can put into practice from the performance jury panel; I hadn't really thought about the difference in audience reaction to song length between audiences who are already fans of a song, and audiences who've never heard it before. Also, as everyone here knows, while my microphone discipline has improved, it still needs some work. Oh, and Betsy's daughter Katie seems to be developing a bit of a voice, which is full of win. (Yeah, I'm jealous. ^_^ )
(Oh good. For those keeping track at home, this is the third time I've had to restart the voice dictation software because it's just gone loopy and started doing random things. I honestly don't know what to do about this, and it's intensely frustrating. It does things like add extra letters at the end of sentences, it gets all sorts of things wrong, I typically have to dictate the sentence three or four times, then fix it by hand, and really, to exhibit how frustrating this is, I would need to record the audio of me playing with this toy and post it. Trying to speak this post has taken an hour. I would have typed it in about ten minutes. I think I'm just going to have to have a lot less Internet presence in the future, and that's really bad from anything like, say, a publicity standpoint.)
Right, back to the convention. I got to perform a couple of my own songs in the open filk circles, "When You Leave" and "Outbirds," and I unexpectedly had a couple of requests - JT wanted me to back him on bodhran when he sang "Chemical Worker's Song" and another new-to-me person whose name I have failed to keep but with whom I talked a lot at the con asked me to do "Pirate Bill and Squidly," which I found and really surprising because the original composer was at the convention! ^_^ But he had already gone to bed at the time, so that's probably why. I met an assortment of people I've asked to Norwescon, and did a lot of Norwescon-related business, particularly on Saturday. (I've given up on the voice thing for now, btw. I'll no doubt pay for that. ;_; ) That part wasn't as fun, but did solve a lot of problems.
Really, my biggest regret was having to leave as early as I did, and even with that, I was pretty fucking exhausted by the time I got home each day. Still, I would have totally stayed for the end-of-convention "smoked salmon" extended performance circle. Next year, I think we'll get a hotel room. It'll be spendy, but if the money works out, it'll be worth it.
I had more I wanted to say, I think, but I have to stop - my hands are not happy.
So, Conflikt. Conflikt is one of those words it's going to get wrong every damn time. at least that one I can understand. Fortunately, Conflikt itself doesn't have any of these problems. Honestly, I gotta say, these people know how to throw a goddamn party. The only frustrating thing is how many people I didn't actually get to hang out with. Really, that includes most of the people I know actually at the convention! Irony is so ironic. Mostly, I got to wave at them as they ran on doing some convention committee thing. I also didn't get to play around with... Peg?'s omg huge bass, and I even talked to her about doing that on Friday but never got the chance to actually do it. But I did get to catch up with Tom Smith, who I haven't seen in a long time, and Alec, who I see more often, but not nearly often enough, and met up with Brooke (briefly) and Foxipher (also briefly) and I met some new people! Whose names I can't remember! Even if I can remember their faces, voices, and such quite well, and the things we did. (Sometimes I hate my brain.)
Anyway, highlights: Tom's concert. He's always been a great live performer, and that's still entirely true, and it was good to hear him again after a long time. Finally getting to play in circle with Alec, even if I didn't get confident enough early enough to take the solo that he tried to hand me. (I feel really lame about that. Part of it was me not being sure people could even hear me, but part of it was also ph33r.) Selling my first CD, even if it is an in progress demo! OMG so awesome! Thanks guys! You are awesome. ^_^ The band scramble; I had a lot of fun working on that, and I think the one-time performance of the band Minotaur went pretty well. ^_^ Sadly, my spectacularly bad problem with names is applicable here, so if you were the other people in the band please reply! That way I can say who you were! We covered one of S00j's songs, "Into the Labyrinth", and it's kind of an amazing song to sing. Something about it, as a performer, is kind of intoxicating. I kind of wish I hadn't also been playing bouzouki, I really wanted to cut loose more completely than I could while also playing an instrument. I also got some advice I really think I can put into practice from the performance jury panel; I hadn't really thought about the difference in audience reaction to song length between audiences who are already fans of a song, and audiences who've never heard it before. Also, as everyone here knows, while my microphone discipline has improved, it still needs some work. Oh, and Betsy's daughter Katie seems to be developing a bit of a voice, which is full of win. (Yeah, I'm jealous. ^_^ )
(Oh good. For those keeping track at home, this is the third time I've had to restart the voice dictation software because it's just gone loopy and started doing random things. I honestly don't know what to do about this, and it's intensely frustrating. It does things like add extra letters at the end of sentences, it gets all sorts of things wrong, I typically have to dictate the sentence three or four times, then fix it by hand, and really, to exhibit how frustrating this is, I would need to record the audio of me playing with this toy and post it. Trying to speak this post has taken an hour. I would have typed it in about ten minutes. I think I'm just going to have to have a lot less Internet presence in the future, and that's really bad from anything like, say, a publicity standpoint.)
Right, back to the convention. I got to perform a couple of my own songs in the open filk circles, "When You Leave" and "Outbirds," and I unexpectedly had a couple of requests - JT wanted me to back him on bodhran when he sang "Chemical Worker's Song" and another new-to-me person whose name I have failed to keep but with whom I talked a lot at the con asked me to do "Pirate Bill and Squidly," which I found and really surprising because the original composer was at the convention! ^_^ But he had already gone to bed at the time, so that's probably why. I met an assortment of people I've asked to Norwescon, and did a lot of Norwescon-related business, particularly on Saturday. (I've given up on the voice thing for now, btw. I'll no doubt pay for that. ;_; ) That part wasn't as fun, but did solve a lot of problems.
Really, my biggest regret was having to leave as early as I did, and even with that, I was pretty fucking exhausted by the time I got home each day. Still, I would have totally stayed for the end-of-convention "smoked salmon" extended performance circle. Next year, I think we'll get a hotel room. It'll be spendy, but if the money works out, it'll be worth it.
I had more I wanted to say, I think, but I have to stop - my hands are not happy.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 05:31 am (UTC)